Scheduling with different maintenance policies in a textile company

Abstract

Purpose

Machine maintenance is essential in many industries. How to schedule maintenance becomes especially important when achieving high shop performance is desired. This paper aims to consider the maintenance scheduling problem in a company where different maintenance situations exist.

Design/methodology/approach

The company, which is famous in South East Asia, specializes in the manufacturing of textiles such as polypropylene and chemical chip. In this paper an algorithm is presented, for five specific situations, for the company to minimize the number of tardy jobs.

Findings

Owing to machine overload in 24‐hour production, machine breakdowns usually occur in the shop. There is an urgent need for the company to derive a procedure that will incorporate the maintenance into the schedule to reduce the machine breakdown. Computational results have showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the current method with an average improvement of 32.5 percent, although the actual average improvement is somewhat lower partly because some jobs are unexpectedly cancelled or changed.

Practical implications

This proposed algorithm is appropriate not only for the studied company, but for those companies where maintenance has to be operated one or several times a month and the maintenance time is so significant that it cannot be ignored.

Originality/value

Provides an algorithm to aid in the maintenance scheduling problem.

Citation

Chen, W. and Liao, C. (2005), "Scheduling with different maintenance policies in a textile company", Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 43-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/13552510510589361